tom cruise cia agent

American Made: Is Monty Schafer Based on a Real CIA Agent?

Within the ‘American Made’ narrative, Doug Liman’s 2017 comedy – action movie delves into the unbelievably true story of Barry Seal , a drug smuggler turned DEA informant who played an instrumental role in the 1980s Iran-Contra Affair. Nevertheless, the film’s storyline, helmed by Tom Cruise as Barry Seal’s on-screen counterpart, remains unconfined by a biopic label and employs generous, creative liberty wherever necessary. As such, the film’s narrative maintains a streamlined storyline punctuated by thrilling twists and turns.

However, the half-fiction, half-true nature of ‘American Made’ also compels viewers to wonder about the actual real-life story that unfolded for Barry Seal. Domhnall Gleeson’s character Monty Schafer, a covert CIA operative, plays a significant role in the development of Barry’s career as a pilot for numerous legal and illegal organizations. Therefore, people are bound to wonder whether or not the agent has any roots in reality. Let’s find out!

Monty Schafer is Not Based on a Real Person

You guessed it wrong! Monty Schafer is not based on a real CIA Agent. The opportunistic government operative from ‘American Made’ who spends most of the film trying to further his career from behind a desk is a product of the filmmaker’s imagination. Schafer’s purpose within the narrative is tied to Barry’s development, offering him opportunities that set the pilot on the path toward a grander adventure.

As such, the film picks up right after Schafer’s involvement in Barry’s life after he scouts him from an airport bar in 1978 and recruits him to run reconnaissance missions for the CIA. However, in real life, Seal’s involvement with the CIA forms an already contested topic of discussion even without including all the implications that Schafer’s character poses through his partnership with Barry.

In the film, Barry quits his job at TWA after receiving Schafer’s offer to work with the CIA. Barry’s drastic career shift is depicted as a reckless decision made due to Barry’s search for a higher thrill, something that remains consistent for the character from then on. Yet, reality took a much different route for Seal, who didn’t willingly leave his job but was instead let go.

In 1972, Seal ran into trouble with the law and was arrested while attempting to move explosives out of the U.S. As a result, in 1974, the TWA fired him for falsifying a medical leave the day he was smuggling weapons. Consequently, Barry’s adventures with the CIA and subsequently Schafer, as showcased in ‘American Made,’ are fabricated from the beginning with little connection to reality.

One of the most prominent sources for the exploration of Seal’s working relationship with the CIA comes from the book ‘Smuggler’s End: The Life and Death of Barry Seal,’ by Del Hahn. In his career within the FBI, Hahn worked on the task force targeting Seal before going on to write a book to dispel the conspiracies and rumors surrounding the smuggler-turned-informant. In his research, Hahn concluded that Seal’s sole confirmed connection with the CIA came in 1984 when the pilot worked for the DEA to collect incriminating evidence against the Sandinistas.

Furthermore, one of the conspiracies that Hahn questioned was the “CIA/Mena Myth.” Thus, one of Schafer’s prominent on-screen storylines that revolved around setting Barry up in Mena, Arkansas, remains another fictitious detail. With all of the above in mind, we can safely conclude that Monty Schafer remains a fictional character with fictional storylines created in service of the film’s narrative.

Nonetheless, Schafer occupies a fascinating space within the film and keeps the narrative alive and engrossing with his presence. While discussing the same with IGN , Domhnall Gleeson said, “He [Schafer] wants a proper office. He wants to get out of his cubicle. And that’s really what is driving him. And it’s a very selfish, very petty, very surprising desire for this CIA guy to have. And it’s just furthering him in his own career, at all costs. I thought that was really, really smart and gave the character a different kind of flavor.” Ultimately, though an interesting character, Monty Schafer remains fictional.

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American Made

• The story of Barry Seal, an American pilot who became a drug-runner for the CIA in the 1980s in a clandestine operation that would be exposed as the Iran-Contra Affair.
• Barry Seal was just an ordinary pilot who worked for TWA before he was recruited by the CIA in 1978. His work in South America eventually caught the eye of the Medellín Cartel, associated with Pablo Escobar, who needed a man with his skill set. Barry became a drug trafficker, gun smuggler and money launderer. Soon acquiring the title, 'The gringo that always delivers'. — Viir khubchandani
• In 1978, the skilled and ambitious TWA pilot Barry Seal smuggles Cuban cigars to increase his income. Out of the blue, he is contacted by the CIA agent Monty Schafer, who asks him to work for the CIA photographing facilities over Central America using a state-of-art small plane. Soon Barry contacts General Noriega as a courier for the CIA and is contacted by the Medellin Cartel that wants him to transport drugs to the USA. Then Schafer asks Barry to carry weapons for the Contras in Nicaragua. Barry invites pilots that are his friends and plots routes to smuggle drugs for the cartel. The CIA closes eyes to the scheme and Barry becomes richer and richer. He uses the Arkansas town Mena to launder his money. But the DEA and the FBI are tracking him down. When the CIA shuts down the scheme, Barry is left alone and arrested by the agencies. What will happen to his family and him? — Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• 1978. Barry Seal, an airline pilot, is recruited by the CIA to fly special transport missions in Central America. Initially it is a matter of information-for-supplies but ultimately he ends up being a drug transporter for Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel and supplying anti-Communist groups, including the Nicaraguan Contras, with weapons. — grantss
• Knowing that he smuggles Cuban cigars into the United States as a profitable side hustle, CIA agent, Monty Schafer, recruits the daredevil TWA pilot, Barry Seal, to take aerial photographs of Sandinista bases in 1978. Before long, with Barry acting as a liaison, delivering money to General Manuel Noriega in exchange for information, Pablo Escobar 's infamous Medellín Cartel enters the picture, with its co-founders, Jorge Ochoa and Carlos Lehder, wanting to have a piece of the action. Now, Seal finds himself leading a peril-laden, cocaine-dusted triple life, and Schafer, as greedy as ever, keeps assigning increasingly dangerous tasks to his thrill-seeking go-getter, including flying guns to the Nicaraguan Contras, leading to the late 1980s Iran/Contra scandal, during the second term of the Ronald Reagan Administration. — Nick Riganas
• Set in the year 1978, Barry Seal (Tom Cruise) works as a pilot for Trans World Airlines. He is married to Lucy (Sarah Wright) and has two children with her, with a third on the way. While at a bar one night, Barry is found by a man saying his name is Monty Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson). He is familiar with Barry's work as a pilot, but Schafer offers him a chance to make better money by taking on reconnaissance missions for the CIA in a smaller plane with cameras just south of the border. Schafer convinces Barry that he would be working for the good guys, but it would have to be kept completely secret, even from his own family. He then lets Barry take the plane out for a ride. As he begins his new job, Barry starts making tapes documenting his travels and exploits. He flies over countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Schafer is so impressed with the photos that Barry brings back to him, that he assigns Barry a new task of being a bag man between the CIA and General Manuel Noriega (Alberto Ospino) in Panama. On his mission, Barry meets the Medellin Cartel - Jorge Ochoa (Alejandro Edda), Carlos Lehder (Fredy Yate Escobar), and Pablo Escobar (Mauricio Mejia). They want to get their drugs into the United States, but the runway for the planes is too risky for most pilots. Barry takes his plane for a ride and almost crashes into the trees but manages to pull up and continue his flight with ease and get back to the U.S. without getting in trouble. Barry now has the trust of the cartel. However, the DEA raid one of their compounds, and Barry is arrested. Schafer finds him in his cell and tells him that his house will get raided, and Lucy will most likely be brought in for questioning and be kept overnight. When Barry gets out, he goes home and urges Lucy and the kids to pack up their things so they can move. Despite Lucy's questioning, Barry insists he cannot tell her a thing, leading her to lose trust in him. The Seals move to Mena, AR. Barry is then given the assignment to move guns for the Contras, even being allowed to own his own airport and planes for the job. His first flight to meet with the Contras ends with them robbing his stuff instead of taking his guns. Barry calls Schafer to let him know that the Contras aren't interested in the guns. On his second trip, he meets with a cartel leader to negotiate sending the guns to the cartel instead. Barry brings guns to the cartel and ships their drugs to the U.S. and the Contras while trying his hardest to avoid being detected by the law. Barry gets four other men to help him on his trips when he realizes the workload is too much for one guy to pull off. They fly separate planes on their missions. Schafer then asks Barry to bring back some of the Contras to the U.S. for the CIA's newly-established training base. Upon arrival, however, some of the men run away. As Barry's business grows, he starts to contribute to the community and provide even more for his family while also shamelessly indulging in his wealth and setting up fronts to hide all the money. Eventually, the Seals are visited by Lucy's freeloading brother JB (Caleb Landry Jones), whom Barry is not fond of. When Lucy tells JB to get a job, Barry sets him up working at the airport. JB ends up taking some money that Barry was hiding in the hangar, using it to buy himself a new car and to pick up an underage girl. The DEA starts to go after the pilots. On one mission, Barry crash-lands and loses a significant portion of the drugs. Meanwhile, the cartel runs into trouble when Escobar declares war on the government, and the cartel gets kicked out of Colombia. Barry must meet with them to sort out the issues. At the same time, JB gets arrested by the sheriff after he is caught carrying a suitcase full of money. After bailing JB out, Barry drives him to a separate car so that he can leave and never return. JB curses Barry and drives away, only to be blown up by a car bomb. Barry gets rid of the car by dumping it in the woods. Barry and Schafer meet to discuss what's been going on. Schafer says the Contras left since they just weren't fighting. The CIA then starts to get rid of anything involving Barry. Barry attempts to move the stash of products out of the airport, but he is found by FBI, DEA, and other law enforcement agents, and he is arrested. Barry meets with a prosecutor, Dana Sibota (Jayma Mays), who is hellbent on getting Barry locked up. As he waits outside while she speaks to a lawyer on the phone, Barry tries to bribe the agents with caddies while also insisting he will walk away scot-free. Sibota comes out and confirms that Barry is free to go. Barry is given a task under Ronald Reagan's administration to gather dirt on the Sandinistas, all of whom are believed to be drug traffickers. They set up cameras in a plane for Barry to get photos as proof. Barry returns to meet with Ochoa and the rest of the Medellin Cartel. As he still has their trust, Barry engages in business with them, moving products into the plane where the photos are taken. The White House later releases the photos as propaganda, and Barry is seen in the photos. He is told that they were not supposed to be released to the public until after the cartel members were caught. The DEA go through Barry's house looking for evidence. Lucy takes the kids to Baton Rouge. Barry is convicted and is sentenced to 1,000 hours of community service. He moves from hotel to hotel each night. On one such night, he is approached in his car by hit-men sent by Escobar, and he is subsequently murdered. The final text states that "Schafer" got promoted after suggesting they get the Iranians to arm the Contras. One of Barry's guys went on to become a pastor in Alabama after he was set free. The rest of the pilots weren't seen after that. The CIA continued to use Barry's plane to arm the Contras until one of the planes was shot down over Nicaragua. The ensuing scandal was known as the Iran-Contra Affair. Lucy returned to Louisiana with the kids. The last thing we see is her working as a cashier at a coffee shop, still wearing a bracelet that Barry gave her.

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Barry Seal: The real-life story behind Tom Cruise's character in American Made

Doug liman’s new film follows the wild true story of a pilot, drug smuggler, and eventual informant, article bookmarked.

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Hollywood screenwriters toil their lives away trying to come up with the next crazy, catchy story to pitch. Yet, sometimes, history does the work for them.

Tom Cruise ‘s latest vehicle American Made , directed by Doug Liman, sees the A-lister play the infamous Barry Seal: a pilot who became a drug smuggler, who in turn became an informant, finding himself at the centre of the Iran-Contra scandal of Ronald Reagan’s era.

Seal’s love of flying blossomed early; he took his first solo flight at the age of 15, before gaining a pilot’s licence at 16, earning money by towing advertising banners. After serving in the Louisiana Army National Guard and Army Reserve, he joined Trans World Airlines in 1968 as a flight engineer, before becoming one of the youngest command pilots in the entire fleet.

• American Made is pure Tom Cruise, all while history takes a backseat

According to his wife Deborah Seal, he became involved in drug smuggling in 1975. During the early 1980s, he developed a close relationship with the Medellin Cartel, whose leadership included Pablo Escobar. It was then that he moved his operations from his home state of Louisiana to an airstrip in rural west Arkansas.

In 1983, however, Seal was caught in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as he tried to smuggle a shipment of Quaaludes into the country. By his own admission, he had by then flown more than 100 flights of 600 to 1200 pounds of cocaine each, equating to between $3bn and $5bn worth of drugs into the US.

He was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Former FBI agent Del Hahn, however, describes how Seal was desperate to avoid jail time ; after his offer to turn snitch was turned down multiple times, he eventually flew straight to DC and the office of the vice president’s drug task force. They sent him to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Seal was soon enlisted into a sting operation. The aim? The Reagan administration was keen to see the Contras militia overthrow the revolutionary Sandinista government which had installed itself in Nicaragua; Seal claimed the Sandinistas had made a deal with the Medellin Cartel, and proof of such could lend justification to the US’s support of the Contras, despite accusations of human rights violations amongst the counter-revolutionaries.

And so, the pilot flew into an airstrip in Nicaragua with CIA cameras installed on his plane, snapping pictures which showed Escobar and several other members of the Medellin Cartel loading kilos of cocaine onto a plane with the aid of Sandinista soldiers.

Seal claimed that one of the men present, Federico Vaughan, was an associate of Tomas Borge of the interior ministry of Nicaragua. However, Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Kwitny threw doubt over Seal’s accusations, claiming there was no evidence tying any Nicaraguan officials to the drug shipment.

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Others, however, jumped on Seal’s testimony. And that would be his undoing. A front page story in The Washington Times by Edmond Jacoby about links between Sandinista officials and the Medellin Cartel discussed Seal’s mission and appeared to out him as a government agent.

The DEA cut him loose, but that also left him vulnerable. He was later arrested by the FBI in Louisiana, though only received six months supervised probation; a condition of his sentence was that he spend every night, from 6pm to 6am, at the Salvation Army halfway house in Baton Rouge.

It was outside of this building that he was shot and killed on 19 February, 1986. A friend said of the incident, “I saw Barry get killed from the window of the Belmont hotel coffee shop. The killers were both out of the car, one on either side, but I only saw one shoot, cause Barry saw it coming and just put his head down on the steering column.”

Colombian assassins sent by the Medellin Cartel were apprehended trying to leave Louisiana soon after Seal’s murder. Three of the men were convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. However, some believe the CIA was behind the killing.

After his death, Louisiana attorney general William Guste hand-delivered a letter to US Attorney General Edwin Meese in protest at the government’s failure to protect Seal. Though he called him a “heinous criminal”, Guste added: “At the same time, for his own purposes, he had made himself an extremely valuable witness and informant in the country’s fight against illegal drugs.”

“Barry Seal’s murder suggests the need for an in-depth but rapid investigation into a number of areas. Why was such an important witness not given protection whether he wanted it or not?” There’s still no real answer to this question today.

‘American Made’ hits UK cinemas 25 August

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What’s Fact and What’s Fiction in American Made

David James, © 2017 Universal Studios.

Like The Wolf of Wall Street , American Made is based on the real-life exploits of a “lovable” rogue, Barry Seal. Also like TWWS , it gets us rooting for our hero despite his engaging in morally questionable, not to mention illegal, activities like gun-running and drug smuggling. To win us over, it uses many of the same techniques employed by TWWS : having our dubious hero played by an extremely charismatic star, in this case Tom Cruise, fully at home in the cockpit as another cocksure pilot; giving him a gorgeous blonde wife and adorable children for whom he’s doing it all; and, that standby of engaging villains from Richard III to House of Cards’  Frank Underwood, breaking the fourth wall with confessions directly into the camera, thus making us co-conspirators.

Plus, director Doug Liman and screenwriter Gary Spinelli streamline the story to suggest Seal had rather less agency in becoming a career criminal than the actual facts would indicate.

Recruitment

In the movie, Seal is an ace pilot whose daredevil streak leads him from TWA to the CIA. He’s bored rigid flying commercial flights, so he takes to performing stunts that trigger the oxygen masks and terrify passengers. His aviation skills and reputation for sailing close to the wind lead to an approach from Schafer, a CIA agent (or possibly a composite of several) played by Domhnall Gleeson (whose father, actor Brendan Gleeson, resembles the stocky real Seal much more than sleek Tom Cruise does). Schafer recruits Seal to take reconnaissance photos of guerillas operating in Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, wooing him with a super-fast, super-nimble twin engine plane.

The real-life Seal seems to have joined up with the CIA much earlier. The late investigative journalist Alexander Cockburn contended that Seal first came into contact with the CIA in the ’60s as a special forces helicopter pilot in Vietnam and maintained links with them throughout his TWA years. Other accounts suggest his links might have gone back as far as the Bay of Pigs. Moreover, although the film suggests Seal was just an excitement-loving pilot who got swept up into espionage at the time, eight years earlier he had been attempting to fly 1,350 pounds of plastic explosives to some anti-Castro Cubans based in Mexico when he was arrested by the U.S. Customs Service . And far from resigning from TWA in 1978 to pursue this new, more exciting career in spying, he was fired in 1974 for falsely claiming medical leave when actually he was absent due to weapons trafficking. He escaped prosecution only because the CIA intervened, stating a trial would threaten national security.

Guerrilla reconnaissance

As a good ol’ boy from Louisiana, Seal readily accepts that the rationale for taking photographs is “fightin’ communists,” and the filmmakers don’t provide much context for this assessment.

In real life, of course, one person’s communist insurgent is another person’s freedom fighter. While certainly left-wing and receiving aid and training from Cuba, the guerrilla movements in these Central American countries were primarily a reaction to brutal dictatorships and, as a 1983 presidential commission reported , “decades of poverty, bloody repression, and frustrated efforts at bringing about political reform.” Oliver Stone’s kind-of based-on-true-events Salvador (1986) gives a view of the conflict from the other side.

Enter the Medellín

2017 Universal Studios, Eric VANDEVILLE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

In American Made , Seal is just minding his own business refueling his plane in Colombia in 1980 when he is bundled into a car and taken to a hidden airstrip in the Colombian jungle. There he is made an offer he can’t refuse by three “businessmen” (one named Pablo Escobar) in need of a pilot with the skills to navigate the dangerously short runway. Already feeling undercompensated by the CIA for the loss of his TWA pension and health care, Seal is swayed by the promise of $2,000 per kilo of cocaine brought to the U.S.

In real life, according to statements in his Drug Enforcement Administration file, Seal was smuggling marijuana as early as 1976 and began smuggling cocaine in 1978, well before any contact with the cartel.

Arrested in Colombia

The film has Seal becoming buddies with cartel kingpins Escobar and Ochoa after forming a lucrative partnership and partying with them at their penthouse in Cartagena, at least until the party is broken up by the Colombian Army. The kingpins, plus Seal, are thrown in jail, but while the Colombians walk free the next day, Seal remains incarcerated until Schafer gets him out. The agent later warns Seal that the smuggler has to get himself and his family out of Baton Rouge before sunrise in order to avoid a police raid and arranges for them to relocate to remote Mena, Arkansas, where the agency provides Seal with not only a house but also an airfield.

In reality, Seal was arrested with 40 kilograms of cocaine and spent nine months in a Honduran jail. There he met Ochoa’s New Orleans business manager, who brought Seal into the Medellín cartel’s orbit in 1982. He became its chief link to cocaine markets in the southeastern U.S., with his 1981 bank records showing daily deposits of $50,000 into a Bahamian bank. Also, he moved to Mena of his own accord in 1982.

Supporting the Contras

In the movie, in return for his get out of jail free card, Schafer wants Seal to fly AK-47s out of Mena to the Contras, the insurgent group tasked with overthrowing the Sandinistas, the leftwing movement that itself overthrew the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza DeBayle in 1979 and took his place. Then Schafer ups the ante by requiring Seal to return bearing Contras who will be trained in Mena. Meanwhile, Seal’s old pals Ochoa and Escobar suggest he drop off some of his guns in Colombia and resume bringing in cocaine on the return trip.

It is certainly true that Seal’s planes (by now he had a fleet) flew from Mena to Colombia, making refueling stops in Panama and Honduras (where the Contras were training) before returning laden with approximately $13 million worth of drugs.

Cockburn, among several other journalists and historians, also alleged that a quid pro quo existed, with the CIA turning a blind eye to Seal’s drug smuggling in return for his using it as cover to get weapons to the Contras. Further, there are allegations that Seal bought several of his planes from CIA-owned companies such as Air America (itself the subject of Roger Spottiswoode’s 1990 movie of the same name ) and Southern Air Transport.

The main source for the allegations that the Contras were brought for training in Arkansas is a book by a former Seal pilot named Terry Reed. However, many of those named in the book have disputed his account, with one bringing suit for libel.

In the film’s telling, the CIA abandoned Seal—getting rid of any paper trail or hard evidence that could link them to the smuggler—right before the ATF and the DEA and the FBI and the state police raid the Mena airport. Seal is charged in Arkansas with weapons, drug, and money-laundering offenses, but gets off with a community service order and is whisked off to the White House.

In reality, the DEA busted Seal for smuggling 200,000 Quaaludes into Florida in 1983. Facing a 10-year stretch, he was desperate to make a deal, but the DEA wasn’t interested. Going over their heads, he met with two members of then–Vice President George H.W. Bush’s Task Force on Drugs, offering his services as an undercover informant. Lured by the promise of getting inside information on the Medellín cartel, in March 1984 the DEA listed Seal as an official informant and got his sentence reduced.

What happened next is murky. According to Robert Joura, the DEA agent working with Seal, on the next pickup either Escobar or Ochoa told Seal the cartel was moving its base from Colombia to Nicaragua and giving a cut of its profits to the Sandinistas in exchange for use of an airfield in Managua.

But given that the cartel was operating more or less with impunity everywhere else in Central America and this would only further antagonize the U.S., another theory suggests this was a scheme cooked up by Seal and Ochoa to keep Seal on the good side of the intelligence community. At any rate, Seal went to Florida to face long-delayed sentencing on his Quaalude bust, receiving 10 years reduced to six months’ probation thanks to letters of support from the CIA and DEA.

Enter Oliver North

At this point, American Made introduces the controversial figure of Lt. Col. Oliver North, Reagan’s point man on anti-Sandinista activities, who is keen to give Seal one more mission: to obtain proof the Nicaraguan government is in bed with the cartel. To this end, they modify his new former Army C-123 transport plane so that he can take photographs unobtrusively.

Seal flies to Managua and duly obtains pictures of Escobar and Sandinista soldiers taking delivery of kilos of cocaine. But in his haste to nail the commies so that Congress will fund arms shipments, North releases the pictures before the Colombians are in custody. His cover blown, Seal is of no further use to the DEA, who promptly seize his assets. Worse, he must spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder for a vengeful cartel.

In real life, Seal’s cover was blown even before the photographs appeared when, thanks to NSC and CIA leaks, the Washington Times ran a front-page story on the Sandinistas’ drug trafficking on July 17, 1984. But Congress was not persuaded and passed the Boland amendment prohibiting direct military aid to the Contras.

This meant that North still needed Seal to run guns for his operation, until the pilot was busted again in December 1984 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for smuggling marijuana. Thanks to testifying in three major drug trials over the next year that helped obtain convictions, he got off with five years’ probation along with six months at a local halfway house. Aftermath and death

As in the movie, three men shot Seal to death as he sat outside a Salvation Army in Baton Rouge in his white Cadillac. He died on Feb. 19, 1986, and three Colombian men were convicted of his murder .

After Seal’s death, a 1986–1989 Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigation popularly known as the Kerry Committee report found that the State Department had made payments to known drug traffickers from funds earmarked for Contra humanitarian assistance. (Arthur L. Liman, the director’s father, was the chief counsel for the Senate investigation, which is what got the filmmaker interested in Iran–Contra in the first place .) The Reagan administration admitted that funds from cocaine smuggling had helped fund the Contras but insisted it was a rogue operation carried out without the government’s knowledge.

Even if some of the specifics vary, the film is true to two essential elements of Seal’s story. One, he made a hell of a lot of money—estimates range from $50 million (Seal himself) to $5 billion (Arkansas State Police investigators). In any case, it all seems to have disappeared. Secondly, Seal was a man caught between a rock and a hard place. As his brother Wendell said , he had become entangled in so many relationships “it was hard to tell who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.”

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American Made

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Rent American Made on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video.

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American Made 's fast-and-loose attitude with its real-life story mirrors the cavalier -- and delightfully watchable -- energy Tom Cruise gives off in the leading role.

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Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Domhnall Gleeson

Monty "Schafer"

Sarah Wright

Jesse Plemons

Sheriff Downing

Caleb Landry Jones

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American Made Is a Super Cynical Crime Caper

Tom Cruise plays Barry Seal, a drug smuggler who worked for the CIA, in Doug Liman’s surprisingly caustic true-story film.

“It’s not a felony if you’re doing it for the good guys,” blares the tagline on the poster for American Made , Tom Cruise’s freewheeling new caper of a film about the life of Barry Seal. It’s the kind of sentiment Hollywood loves to celebrate—a rebel breaking the rules for an important cause, or even a patriotic one, as Seal did working off the books for the CIA. What better casting could there be for such a role than Cruise, sporting a shaggy ’70s hairdo and a pair of aviators, executing daredevil pilot moves as he flies around Central and South America? It’s Maverick from Top Gun all over again, just a little grimier.

Except Seal’s life was more than a little grimy—he was a grade-A drug smuggler, a favorite of the Medellín Cartel and Pablo Escobar. Whatever CIA benefactors he served were essentially blackmailing him into clandestine ops to serve shady operations like the Iran-Contra affair. The director Doug Liman takes advantage of Cruise in a fascinating way (much as he did with the star in Edge of Tomorrow , the duo’s last collaboration): by poking at his inherent charisma and peeling it back, mocking the very idea of the American cowboy hero at the center of his boisterous but refreshingly cynical tale.

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When we meet Seal, he’s a TWA pilot with a low-level smuggling business on the side, bringing a duffel bag of contraband with him on his flights to score a little extra dough. He’s approached by Monty (Domhnall Gleeson), a CIA agent with a proposition for him: Fly a little propeller plane over rebel bases in Central and South America, take some pictures, and maybe drop off some secret packages for Manuel Noriega, the U.S.-supported military leader in Panama. Good money, off the books, very hush-hush, but all in the name of serving his country.

Seal obliges, and quickly things spiral out of control. Escobar, then on the rise in Colombia, takes note of Seal’s secret flights and demands he start shipping bricks of cocaine on the way back, dumping them out of the air in Louisiana to avoid the DEA. The CIA eventually cottons on but allows the whole thing to continue, as long as Seal can smuggle back some guns for the Contras fighting in Nicaragua. Escobar tolerates that, as long as Seal can operate a whole fleet of cocaine planes to keep his product moving. On and on it goes, with both sides tacitly ignoring the other so that Seal can keep operating extralegally wherever he goes.

Liman and his screenwriter Gary Spinelli tell the tale with all the freewheeling charm required of a caper picture. But American Made never lets the audience forget just how shadily the CIA is behaving throughout, even though Seal is always along for the ride. He has to be—the house of cards he’s built collapses if any of the extralegal organizations he’s working with gets sick of him—and Cruise plays Seal as breezy with just a hint of desperation.

Cruise, one of the last titans of the 1990s who’s still regularly churning out these kinds of star-driven vehicles, already had one flop this year— The Mummy­ —in which he strained credulity as a virile, strapping young adventurer. At 55, Cruise is far older than the man he’s playing (who was 40 at the height of his CIA misadventures, though his life story has been significantly smoothed out and Hollywoodized). But Liman uses Cruise’s age mostly to his advantage, playing up the cracks in Cruise’s façade, especially as Seal tries to convince his wife Lucy (Sarah Wright) that his newfound wealth isn’t ill-gotten.

American Made ’s best set pieces revolve around Seal’s obvious lie; it’s quite something to watch the smuggler, covered in blood, cheerfully shoving clothes in a garbage bag and telling Lucy they have to leave home before the sun rises. At another point, a drug run gets interrupted by the DEA and Seal ends up ditching the plan in a small town in Louisiana, getting away from the cops on a children’s bicycle while covered in cocaine. It’s been a while since Cruise made a movie this risky, but American Made is exactly that—it’s a story where Ronald Reagan ends up as the ultimate villain, and Pablo Escobar comes across as the most level-headed of Seal’s bosses.

Liman’s visual panache is lacking at times. The action scenes are often shoddily edited, keeping Seal’s daring flights from feeling genuinely thrilling, and whatever late ’70s/early ’80s look he’s aiming for is absent outside of the hairdos. Cruise, for all his live-wire energy (and he has a lot of it), should probably stop making films that so willfully deny his age, even though he’s talented enough to make it work for two hours. But by the time the movie roared to its shockingly grim, remarkably embittered ending, American Made had won me over. Barry Seal, it turns out, isn’t a hero worth rooting for—but neither are the “good guys” handing him the keys to the plane.

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American Made Is the Best Tom Cruise Has Been in Years

It’s at least 15 minutes till American Made reveals its framing device, a cruddy VHS home-video recording circa 1985 of Barry Seal (Tom Cruise) sweatily recounting his story in a still-bemused, “you’re not going to believe this shit” confessional style. These updates continue, accompanied by rushed, handwritten intertitles (“TWA ’78,” “DEA ’83”) as Barry takes us through his improbable tale of arms dealing, drug trafficking, and money laundering at the behest of the U.S. government during the Reagan administration’s covert funding of the Nicaraguan Contras.

But when an actor like Cruise tells us things are about to get crazy, we lean forward in our seats instinctively. No matter how corrupt and unconscionable the mess Barry finds himself in, he’s either clueless or amoral enough to summon a convivial outlook on it all. As the film nears its inevitable conclusion, Barry tries to sum up what he’s learned. He cocks his chin and looks down the barrel of the lens. “You try telling me this isn’t the greatest country in the…” Before he can finish that thought, the tape degrades into nothingness. At my screening, you could hear a pin drop.

If you’re the type of viewer who thought Wolf of Wall Street ’s failing was that it looked too cool, American Made is for you. It’s the grubbiest, greasiest vision of bad boys gettin’ away with it in recent memory, a glass of sour milk specifically timed to curdle just at the moment you think it might be harmless. Doug Liman’s direction is jarring and oftentimes downright ugly; sometimes it feels like a miracle that César Charlone’s camera lands on the actors at all. But boy, does it move. Perhaps improbably, especially for a film starring a man who’s still one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, if not the biggest, it bears more resemblance to Liman’s scrappy 1999 debut Go than anything he’s made this century.

The film is based on the true story of Seal, a TWA pilot who is recruited to take aerial photographs of Sandinista bases by CIA agent Monty Schafer. Schafer, played with gleeful sliminess by Domhnall Gleeson, is the quintessential Cruise foil, a paper-pusher in a slick suit who is too cowardly to get his own hands dirty. The difference here is that Barry matches Monty for slime, pound for pound — he’s got little in the way of a conscience, already having a side hustle going smuggling Cuban cigars from Canada. He takes the assignment, which he’s so good at that he soon becomes a liaison between the agency and General Noriega, flying down large sums of cash in exchange for intel. During one of these missions, he’s intercepted by Pablo Escobar’s cartel, and soon begins trafficking cocaine on the side, because hey, when in Panama. Basically, he’s either the best or worst multitasker ever.

The CIA, as personified by Gleeson, begins heaping bigger and more dangerous jobs on him, and Seal, not wanting or knowing how to say no, goes along with all of it. It eventually necessitates moving him and his family to a small town in Arkansas, where he’s given 2,000 acres to run what has now become a gun-running, drug-smuggling, Contra-training operation. His pretty blonde wife (Sarah Wright) does what all wives of men with lucrative extralegal professions do: pout and protest and then enjoy the mountains of cash with gusto.

I’ve read some critics say that Cruise, who is now 55 years old, needs to plot a career strategy to gracefully age out of these sorts of brash, action-oriented roles. But his strangely aging visage is as compelling as ever; at times it looks as if he’s being physically dragged toward his 60s against his will. It serves the film well, despite the fact that Seal himself was at least a decade younger throughout most of the events that inspired American Made. As played by Cruise, Barry is a man who ardently doesn’t want to grow up, and happens to be slick and charismatic enough to stave it off longer than most. Liman is attuned to this frequency of Cruise’s better than most directors, having found a similar manic note for him in the excellent Edge of Tomorrow. And American Made, which is consistently better than it has to be despite still hitting the occasional cliché pothole, is the best Cruise has been in years.

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Movie Reviews

Take me to the pilot: 'american made' soars.

Chris Klimek

I'd Like to Fly the World Some Coke: In American Made , Tom Cruise plays Barry Seal, a drug- running pilot in the 1980s. David James/Universal Studios hide caption

I'd Like to Fly the World Some Coke: In American Made , Tom Cruise plays Barry Seal, a drug- running pilot in the 1980s.

Slickness is a virtue in American Made, a cheerfully blistering yarn starring Tom Cruise as real-life-TWA-pilot-turned-CIA-stooge-turned-cocaine-smuggler Barry Seal. Piquant and picaresque, it's essentially a hybrid of Goodfellas and Air America. Those movies — one rightly revered, the other all but forgotten — were released about a month apart from one another back in 1990, a long-ago cinematic era when either one might nevertheless have starred... Tom Cruise.

He'd just scored an Oscar nomination playing real-life Vietnam vet-turned-antiwar activist Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July, then immediately re-upped with Top Gun director Tony Scott for the NASCAR action flick Days of Thunder . Sure, Goodfellas was the best American film of 1990, but Days of Thunder grossed nearly twice as much. A few years shy of 30, Cruise had found the golden mean of artistic cred and bankability that few movie stars achieve. Four years later, no longer content to race stock cars at 200 miles per hour, he would earn his pilot's license. American Made director Doug Liman claims the star performed all of Seal's daredevil low-altitude flying scenes himself.

We'd infer that, at this point. Among its other virtues, American Made takes the longest-lived, most hands-on A-lister in the history of cinema and gives him a line — repeated twice in the movie — that sums up his range and staying power better than anything Maverick or Jerry Maguire or the top-knotted MRA guru he played in Magnolia ever said: "I'm the gringo who always delivers."

Undeniably. Incontrovertibly.

Disclosure: I have not seen The Mummy.

But I have seen American Made, and I am here to tell you it's everything you could want from a flashy true-crime biopic skewering the hypocrisy and malice of the Reagan Administration's covert war in Central and South America. That included the C.I.A.'s recruitment of skilled, flexibly-scrupled pilots like Seal to work as snoops and gunrunners.

Gary Spinelli's screenplay takes liberties with the facts of Seal's life, but not with the sheer scale of the conspiracy. Liman calls the film "a fun lie based on a true story." That's notable only because it's a story to which the director has a personal connection: His father, Arthur Liman, was chief counsel of the Senate Iran-Contra committee of the late 1980s. By the time the elder Liman was among those questioning Oliver North about his role in government-sanctioned drug trafficking on live TV, Seal had already been dead for more than a year.

In this telling, Cruise's Seal is so bored flying for TWA circa 1978 that he fakes an episode of turbulence, scaring a cabin full of passengers awake. The ubiquitous Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson, playing a white-collar spook who knows all about Seal's sideline smuggling Cuban cigars, fast-talks him into serving his country while also indulging his need for speed, setting him up with a sleek Piper Aerostar 600 equipped with special cameras. The scenes between Gleeson and Cruise are especially fun: Cruise's character is a huckster himself, so he knows he's being taken. Game recognize game.

Seal is a reliable, daring pilot, but also easily led by the nose and good at keeping his mouth shut, so his employers turn a blind eye once he begins flying shipments of cocaine from Medellín, Colombia to Louisiana, dropping the bags in the swamp for pickup before landing. Liman shot on location in Colombia, and these scenes are alive with tension and detail, right down to the sweat stains that threaten to dissolve the fibers of Cruise's enviable wardrobe of pearl-snap shirts. Seal forms a not-entirely-voluntary compact with young Pablo Escobar (Colombian actor Mauricio Mejía), soon to become the Steve Jobs of coke smuggling.

Liman and Spinelli do a good job with the practical how-tos of dope smuggling, and they make great comic hay of Seal's increasingly desperate attempts to launder or just-plain-store his gym bags full of cash. (A FBI agent drives down the main street of tiny Mena, Arkansas, where the Agency has set up Seal and his family once the local cops drive him out of Louisiana, and finds nothing but banks with fresh paint on their signs.) As competing law-enforcement agencies close in, the Reagan administration's shadow war — backing the Contras against the Sandinistas — becomes Seal's saving grace. Liman works in real clips of First Lady Nancy Reagan urging American children to "just say no" and the President answering reporters' questions about what he knew and when he knew it with bromides about how delicious his Thanksgiving turkey is going to be. A sub-two-hour movie covering an eight-year period inevitably means dollops of exposition, but Liman handles this adroitly, with a mix of animated segments and VHS video diaries from Cruise. Seal really made videos like this, so it doesn't feel like cheating.

Cruise affects a mild Louisiana accent, but he hasn't gained weight or shaved his hairline back or made any other awards-baiting attempt to resemble the historical Seal, who was almost a decade younger than Cruise when he died. He's past all that now. The arguments for this are the same as the ones for casting Cruise as the tall, blonde literary antiheroes Lestat and Jack Reacher: His room-filling energy is more notable than any distinguishing physical feature. He's a huckster. He has the liar's superpower of being able to make himself believe anything he needs to believe.

American Made is also a perfect fit for Liman, who began his career with the sweaty indie comedy Swingers, was nearly fired from the franchise-launching The Bourne Identity (Universal did not invite him back for the sequels) , and found common cause with Cruise on Edge of Tomorrow, one of the shrewdest and most original shoulda-been-a-blockbusters of the 21st century. He's got almost as many misfires on his resume as hits, and that's because he allows a perceptible measure of chaos into his movies. In the case of even a fictionalized biopic of a guy like Seal — a man who literally flew by the seat of his pants, low enough to brush the treetops, until what would eventually become known as the Medellín cartel caught up to him in a parking lot — that Demme-esque wildness is exactly the right method. And Liman is tireless: He shot, edited, and released the micro-budget war thriller The Wall for Amazon Studios during the interval while American Made was in postproduction. He's at least as much a one-for-them, one-for me guy as Christopher Nolan or Steven Soderbergh.

In American Made, he's found his shaggy-dog happy place: It's one for us.

‘American Made’ Ending Explained: What Happened to Barry Seal?

What happens to Seal after he becomes an informant for the DEA?

The Big Picture

• American Made is a true story about Barry Seal, a commercial pilot who becomes involved with government agencies and drug cartels in the '70s and '80s.
• Tom Cruise delivers a wonderful performance in a movie that initially flew under the radar.
• The film tackles complex themes such as the Iran-Contra affair and the Sandanista government coup in Venezuela.

The 2017 Tom Cruise film American Made is an unlikely true story, to say the least. Cruise plays Barry Seal, a real-life commercial pilot who ends up being recruited by multiple government agencies to infiltrate the South American drug cartels in the late '70s into the early '80s. And his on-again, off-again Southern drawl aside, it's a wonderful performance from the Mission: Impossible star in a movie that flew under the radar upon its initial release. And because the events depicted in American Made are taken directly from a true story, it makes it an even more fascinating story of how a commercial airline pilot ended up dealing with the likes of Pablo Escobar and the dangerous Medellín drug cartel in Colombia. Let's break down an ending that gets a little convoluted as just about every United States agency is involved at some point along with tie-ins to some political events unfolding at the same time including the Iran-Contra affair and the Sandanista government coup in Venezuela.

American Made

The story of Barry Seal, an American pilot who became a drug-runner for the CIA in the 1980s in a clandestine operation that would be exposed as the Iran-Contra Affair.

What Is 'American Made About'?

Directed by Doug Liman , American Made is the true story of Barry Seal who was a commercial pilot for TWA , a now-defunct airline, back in the late 70s when he was busted for smuggling illegal contraband into the United States aboard the jets he was flying. He is then given a choice to face jail time or become an informant for the CIA and Agent Monty Schafer ( Domhnall Gleeson ). He chooses the latter and within just a few months finds himself as a contract CIA employee running guns for the US government and both trafficking and providing intelligence for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) on the boon of illegal drugs flowing out of South America. He does this while trying to maintain a normal family life with his wife Lucy ( Sarah Wright ) and a couple of kids living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It's a harrowing tale of a man who risks his own life and his family to avoid the wrath of the government and the FBI. Given Cruise's fascination with flying in both the Top Gun movies and the Mission Impossible franchise, it turned out to be a perfect fit for the amateur aviator and ultimate thrill seeker .

How Long Had Barry Seal Worked For the CIA in 'American Made'?

Once Ronald Reagan took office in 1980, American involvement in Central and South America grew exponentially as Reagan had promised to take a more hard-line approach to calamitous regimes that were popping up throughout the more unstable countries of the region. Seal began smuggling small amounts of marijuana into the country dating back to 1976. By 1978, he graduated to importing large amounts of cocaine from countries like Ecuador and Honduras.

By the early '80s, Barry Seal was running large amounts of drugs for the infamous Medellín cartel and the most notorious drug kingpin of the era, Pablo Escobar, from Colombia into the United States via the Gulf of Mexico. The DEA became aware of Seal's activity in 1981 and after several years of legal wrangling and indictments, Seal officially started contract work for the Central Intelligence Agency in 1983 until his death in February 1986 at just 46 years of age.

What Leads to Barry Seal's Demise in 'American Made'?

The final scenes in American Made are dedicated to a large cocaine haul that involved Pablo Escobar and several high-ranking members of his cartel. On what turns out to be Barry Seal's final run for the Medellín cartel, he agrees with his handler at the DEA, James Rangel ( Benito Martinez ) to install a hidden camera within the cargo of the fuselage of his plane. This camera captures Seal along with several Medellín lieutenants along with members of the controversial Venezuelan Sandanista government loading palettes of drugs into the plane. The pictures are supposed to be classified, but in the days that follow, they are aired when President Reagan goes on the air to expose what is happening in South America and Barry can be seen prominently in the photos. This is the beginning of the end for Barry as Escobar will surely be targeting him for betraying him which means certain death. He decides to stay away from his family so they won't be in danger when the retaliation comes.

Tom Cruise Made a Blink-and-You-Miss-It Cameo in a Brat Pack Western

Once Escobar knows that Barry has betrayed him and is working for the government, Barry is obviously concerned for his own well-being as Escobar has killed more important men than him for less. He goes into hiding moving from motel to motel on a daily basis to elude what he assumes are Medellín cartel members looking to assassinate him. He makes a series of video journal entries detailing some of his exploits as a sort of memoir. During this time, he is also serving a probation period of 6 months in Arkansas for being found in possession of a warehouse full of drugs and guns. So he spends half of the day in a halfway house and the other half hiding from Escobar's hitmen. Eventually, Barry's luck runs out, and while sitting outside the Arkansas halfway house one afternoon, two Medellín cartel assassins approach him as he is seated in his car and shoot him dead .

'American Made's Satirical CIA Ending and Final Shot Explained

After Barry's cover is blown when Reagan goes on TV and shows the photos of him engaged with the Medellín cartel and Sandanista regime, DEA agents celebrate with a toast of champagne while CIA Agent Monty Schafer frantically walks through the office telling his employees to get rid of anything and everything that has Barry Seal's name on it. They need to erase Barry from ever being involved with any CIA activity. In a tongue-in-cheek final line, Shafer has an epiphany and decides that they will say that the Iranians sold arm the Contras to explain away their involvement with Barry who had also been running guns down to the Contras who were fighting the oppressive and illegitimate Sandinista government in Venezuela. As he posits this idea to a colleague there is a caption below him that reads, "Schafer got a promotion."

This was what started the infamous Iran-Contra affair in the mid-1980s that brought down Colonel Oliver North . There is also a sequence that describes how, even after Barry's assassination, the CIA continued to use his plane to run guns to the Contras in Venezuela until it was shot down over Nicaragua. The last scene of American Made shows Lucy back behind the counter of a fast food restaurant working the cash register showing that he has come full circle on her wild ride with Barry. Doug Liman emphasizes the final shot of the nice bracelet on her wrist as she extends her arm to give a customer their order. One final ode to the wild ride that was the life of Barry Seal.

American Made is available to rent on Amazon Prime Video in the U.S.

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• The True Story Behind the Movie <em>American Made</em>

The True Story Behind the Movie American Made

American Made , the new Tom Cruise crime drama out Sept. 29, has all the makings of a romp: drug running and arms smuggling. An FBI sting. Enough cold, hard cash to make the phenomenon of raining money a plausible ecological scenario. And a sex scene in the cockpit of a plane. That’s flying through the air. With one participant being the pilot. Did we mention it’s Tom Cruise?

If it sounds like an exercise in screenwriting excess, it’s not entirely — the film takes as its inspiration the true story of Adler Berriman “Barry” Seal, a TWA pilot who became a drug smuggler for the Medellín Cartel and, later, an informant for the DEA. It’s an ideal vehicle for Cruise, a.k.a. Maverick , whose mischievous swagger is accented here (literally) with a Louisiana drawl.

The movie hardly purports to be a documentary — director Doug Liman, who reteams with Cruise after Edge of Tomorrow , has referred to it as “a fun lie based on a true story.” And perhaps its looseness with the facts is for the best, as conflicting accounts make it difficult to get a clear picture on certain aspects of Seal’s seemingly made-for-the-movies life. It’s a thorny story that takes place against the backdrop of the Reagan-era War on Drugs and the notorious Iran-Contra affair , with Seal never hesitating to do business with opposing sides, so long as the payout was prodigious.

Here’s what we know about Seal — and what’s still up for debate.

MORE: Review: American Made Lets a Smug Tom Cruise Just Be Tom Cruise

Fact: Seal was an unusually talented young pilot.

According to Smuggler’s End: The Life and Death of Barry Seal — written by retired FBI agent Del Hahn, who worked on the task force that went after Seal in the ’80s — Seal obtained his student pilot license at 15 and became fully licensed at 16. His instructor was so impressed by his natural talent that he allowed him to fly solo after only eight hours of training. After serving in the National Guard and Army Reserve, he became a pilot with TWA, among the youngest command pilots to operate a Boeing 707.

Fact: He had a colorful personality.

As Cruise plays him, Seal was a blend of balls and braggadocio, fond of stunts and rarely registering the possibilities of danger or failure. According to Hahn, Seal’s high school yearbook photo was accompanied by the inscription, “Full of fun, full of folly.” His flight instructor described him as wild and fearless and generally unconcerned with the consequences of his actions. In an interview with Vice , Hahn says Seal was personable but “not as smart and clever as he thought he was.”

Partly Fiction: He was married to a woman named Lucy and they had three kids.

Sarah Wright plays Seal’s delightfully foul-mouthed wife in the movie, alternately exasperated by his schemes and enthralled by the riches they bring. In reality, Seal was married three times and had five children. He had a son and daughter with first wife Barbara Bottoms, whom he married in 1963 and subsequently divorced. He then married Linda McGarrh Ross in 1971, divorcing a year later, before marrying Deborah Ann DuBois, with whom he would go on to have three children, in 1974.

Fiction: The government first took notice of his smuggling when he was transporting Cuban cigars.

While the film depicts Seal’s foray into smuggling as beginning with Cuban cigars, his first documented run-in with the law for a smuggling offense took place in 1972 when he was one of eight people arrested for a plot to smuggle explosives out of the U.S. Though he wasn’t convicted, he lost his job with TWA. By 1976, according to Hahn, he had moved onto marijuana, and within a couple of years graduated to cocaine, which was less bulky, less sniffable by dogs and generally more profitable.

Fact: He smuggled drugs in through the Louisiana coast.

Seal and the pilots he recruited — including one he met in jail and his first wife’s brother — trafficked drugs over the border of his home state. As in the movie, he sometimes delivered them by pushing packed duffel bags out of his plane and into the Atchafalaya basin, to be retrieved by partners on the ground.

Mostly Fiction: Seal was chummy with the leaders of Colombia’s Medellín Cartel, including Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa brothers.

In the movie, Seal meets the cartel big wigs early on. In reality, Hahn writes, he did not deal with them directly, and they referred to him only as “El Gordo,” or “The Fat Man.” He finally met with them in April 1984 when he was working with the DEA on a sting operation intended to lead to their capture. (That operation would go awry when Seal’s status as an informant was revealed in a Washington Times cover story months later.)

Fact: Seal offered to cooperate with the DEA to stay out of prison.

The DEA was onto Seal for a long time before securing an indictment against him in March 1983 on several counts, including conspiracy to distribute methaqualone and possession with intent to distribute Quaaludes. As the movie suggests, there was some confusion among government agencies intent on taking him down.

His initial attempt to make a deal with a U.S. attorney, offering information on the Ochoa family, was rejected. But in March 1984, he traveled to Washington to the office of the Vice President’s Drug Task Force and cut a deal on the strength of his intel on and connections to the cartel.

Contested: He worked for many years alongside the CIA.

The film has Seal’s involvement with the CIA beginning in the late 1970s, relatively early on in his smuggling career. Under the handling of an agent played by Domhnall Gleeson, Cruise’s Seal gathers intelligence by flying low over Guatemala and Nicaragua and snapping photos from his plane. Later, the CIA turns a blind eye to his drug smuggling in exchange for his delivery of arms to the Contras in Nicaragua, who the U.S. government was attempting to mobilize against the leftist Sandinistas, who controlled the government. The movie even suggests that the CIA helped set Seal up with his very own airport in the small town of Mena, Ark.

According to Hahn’s book, rumors of Seal’s involvement with the CIA anytime before 1984 were just that — rumors. The only confirmed connection between Seal and the CIA turned up by Hahn’s research was in 1984, after Seal had begun working as an informant for the DEA. The CIA placed a hidden camera in a cargo plane Seal flew to pick up a cocaine shipment in Colombia. He and his copilot were able to obtain photographs that proved a link between the Sandinistas and the cartel, key intelligence for the Reagan administration in its plans to help overthrow the Sandinistas’ regime. But the final piece of the operation — a celebration of the successful cocaine transport, at which the Ochoas and Escobar were to be arrested all at once — never happened because of the revelation of Seal’s status as an informant.

Fact: Seal was assassinated in 1986.

Jorge Ochoa reportedly ordered a hit on Seal early in 1986. At the time, Seal was living in a Baton Rouge Salvation Army facility. Charges against him had not been fully erased as a result of his cooperation with the government, and he was sentenced to probation and six months residing at the treatment center. On the evening of Feb. 19, just after he parked his Cadillac, he was killed by two Colombian hitmen armed with machine guns.

Thanks in part to several witnesses, both men and four additional men who conspired in the killing were arrested within two days. Seal would go down as a legendary criminal, one of the most important witnesses in DEA history and — in Hollywood’s estimation, at least — a classic American story fit for only our most American onscreen hero.

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• DVD & Streaming

American Made

• Comedy , Drama

Content Caution

In Theaters

• September 29, 2017
• Tom Cruise as Barry Seal; Domhnall Gleeson as Schafer; Sarah Wright as Lucy Seal; Alejandro Edda as Jorge Ochoa; Mauricio Mejía as Pablo Escobar; Fredy Yate Escobar as Carlos Ledher; Robert Farrior as Oliver North; Caleb Landry Jones as JB; E. Roger Mitchell as Agent Craig McCall

Home Release Date

• January 2, 2018

Distributor

Movie review.

Cigars. It all started with cigars.

It’s 1978. Hotshot TWA pilot Barry Seal rakes in extra cash on the side smuggling Cuban cigars from Canada to the States.

Until the day Schafer shows up.

Schafer—a CIA agent with a fat file on Barry’s cigar smuggling scheme—nevertheless recognizes the pilot’s undeniable entrepreneurial bent, his willingness to take risks. Barry’s the kind of guy, he figures, who’d jump at the chance to trade his boring commercial pilot job for something a little more jazzy. A little more dangerous. Like, say, flying the world’s fastest prop plane over various countries in Central America and taking spy photos of suspected Communist operatives there. Countries like Nicaragua. El Salvador. Guatemala. Honduras. Columbia.

Barry’s intrigued. Plus there’s that fat file in Schafer’s hand. How can he say no?

And, well, it turns out the word no isn’t really in Barry Seal’s vocabulary anyway. So when he’s abducted in Columbia by ascending drug kingpins Jorge Ochoa, Carlos Ledher and Pablo Escobar, he responds to their “request” for him to fly their white powdery product back to the States in exactly the same way he did to Schafer’s request. After all, how can he say no? They’ve got guns. They’ve got his plane. And they’re willing to pay him $2,000 per kilo of cocaine he flies north.

And Barry can pack a lot of kilos in his plane.

Surveillance on the way down. Drug-running on the way back. Lots of cash for Barry’s pretty, mostly in-the-dark wife, Lucy.

Then Schafer ups the ante: The CIA wants Barry to start carrying illegal Russian AK-47s to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Oh, and to bring some of those freedom fighters back to the U.S. (Barry and his wife have been moved by the CIA to a remote area outside of Mena, Ark.) for training.

How can Barry say no? Especially when he’s making so much money that he’s literally run out of places to stash it.

Plus, what could possibly go wrong for a man who’s spying, running drugs and guns as well as illegally trafficking Nicaraguan rebels?

Positive Elements

Barry Seal doesn’t have much of a moral core to speak of. But by film’s end, his unlikely story does deliver a cautionary message: You can only break the rules and live outside the law so long before the consequences catch up with you.

No, Barry’s not a particularly moral man, but he does love and care for his wife, Lucy, and their three children. He wants to provide for them (and, boy, does he!), and he wants them to be safe. (That last desire gets increasingly difficult for Barry to make good on as the stakes rise violently near the end of the film.) Lucy, for her part, also wants to protect her children—perhaps more so than Barry himself does.

Spiritual Elements

Barry gets detained by a trio of drug lords in Columbia. The main one he deals with is Jorge Ochoa. Jorge brags about the burgeoning cocaine business in Columbia, saying, “Now God above has blessed this country with new riches, Mr. Seal.” When Barry’s nervous about his drug-laden plane’s ability to take off from a short, high-altitude runaway in the Columbian jungle, Jorge gives him a crucifix and says, “Christ will keep you safe.” Barry takes the cross, rubs it (as if for good luck) and hangs it from some controls in his plane’s cockpit.

Throughout the film, the camera occasionally focuses on the cross, perhaps implying that at some point, Barry’s spiritual “good luck charm” may not be potent enough to keep him alive.

We see nuns and priests in the background of a couple of scenes in Columbia. Before the closing credits, we learn that one of Barry’s former associates “found God” and became a preacher.

Sexual Content

Lucy often waits for Barry to get home to have sex with him. She greets him in skimpy negligee once. Several scenes picture them having sex (including one quick-cut montage that shows them making love in three different places). One sex scene takes place while Barry is flying. Movements and noises are explicit in each of these scenes, though nudity is strategically avoided. We also see Barry in bed, shirtless, with his wife lying next to him.

Lucy wears revealing outfits, and we see her in a bikini. Barry likes to moon his family as a joke, and we see his bare rear a couple of times. Lucy grabs his (clothed) backside once.

One of Barry’s fellow TWA coworkers says that when women in hotels see a man in a pilot’s uniform, their “panties come off.” Barry gives pornographic magazines to men in a rough part of Central America to keep them from beating him up and stealing his clothes.

Violent Content

Barry knows no fear behind the stick of his plane. But things get hairy more than once. He tears through the upper canopies of trees in Columbia, barely making it above the forest on takeoff because his plane is so loaded down with coke. In another scene, he zooms into a residential neighborhood to land (trying to avoid DEA agents), and his plane’s wings get shredded before what’s left of the vehicle comes to a halt in someone’s front yard.

Barry is repeatedly shot at by military forces of the governments he’s spying upon. At one point, an engine gets hit and explodes, but Barry just laughs. He also gets beat up badly (mostly offscreen) in Columbia. We later see that he’s lost a tooth, and his face is bloodied as well.

A man is killed when a bomb unexpectedly blows up his car. [ Spoiler Warning ] The government eventually compels Barry to film the Columbian drug dealers he’s been working with (in order to avoid prison). When those men discover they’ve been betrayed, they send assassins to kill Barry. (We see only two men approaching either side of a car that Barry’s sitting in, and we hear that he’s been murdered.)

Crude or Profane Language

About 60 f-words, including at least five combined with “mother.” More than 25 s-words. God’s name is taken in vain at least 15 times, about half of those uses paired with “d–n.” Jesus’ name is taken in vain once. We hear about 10 instances of “h—,” and four of “d–n.” Other vulgarities include one use of the c-word, and one or two utterances each of “b–ch,” “a–,” “a–hole,” “p-ss,” “p–sies” and “pr–k.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

Barry smuggles cocaine for the Columbian cartel on a massive level, transporting so much of the illegal drug that he hires four other pilots to fly missions with him. We learn that Barry shipped billions of dollars of the stuff singlehandedly.

Accordingly, we see myriad plastic wrapped bricks of coke. Barry devises a way to drop them from the bottom of his plane, and we see him “bombing” recipients who wait in Louisiana’s swamps to collect the narcotic parcels. When Barry crawls out of his plane after that rough residential landing, he’s covered with the cocaine that’s accidentally erupted in the process. We also see an older woman with many kilos of cocaine taped to her body after she’s arrested.

Various characters smoke cigarettes and drink different kinds of alcohol throughout the film. We see boxes of the illegal Cuban cigars Barry is smuggling.

Other Negative Elements

Schafer is clearly aware Barry’s smuggling drugs. So he gives Barry detailed maps of all the places other federal agencies will be operating, so that the smuggler can successfully evade them.

Barry is eventually arrested after being pursued by three different federal agencies. The Arkansas attorney general is about to put him away for life when she gets a call from then-governor Bill Clinton (and the former politician’s name is used by her in the film) telling them to release Barry.

Though it’s clear that at least some people in the government know Barry has been smuggling enormous quantities of cocaine, they apparently turn a blind eye to those activities. Simultaneously, we see newsreel footage of Ronald and Nancy Reagan talking about the perils of drug use. The intended message is unmistakeable: that the Reagan administration was deeply hypocritical when it came to the supposed War on Drugs. Even as Nancy admonishes, “Just say no,” Barry’s delivering tons of coke with the CIA’s knowledge and tacit consent.

At one point, Barry says incredulously to Schafer, “All this is legal?” The CIA agent responds, “Yeah, if you’re doing it for the good guys.” Barry’s wife is skeptical at first, but he works hard to convince her, saying, “This is gonna be good for us.” It’s not clear if he ever completely comes clean with her about what’s happening. No wonder when he asks her later, “Do you trust me?” she responds with an emphatic, “No!”

Early in the film, Barry is annoyed that his co-pilot—on a commercial flight—is sleeping. So he takes the plane off autopilot and puts into a dive just to wake his coworker up. People are screaming in the cabin, luggage is falling. But Barry? He’s just laughing.

We hear verbal references to the businesses Barry establishes to launder the vast amounts of cash he’s being paid. We see a man urinating (from behind, nothing critical is shown) in a jail cell. Another person, who thinks he’s about to be shot, wets himself.

If you’re already cynical about alleged government deception and corruption, American Made won’t help matters much.

Oh, Tom Cruise is likeable at times as a brash rogue pilot whose devil-may-care approach to his incredibly risky business certainly makes for a compelling story. And this profanity-laden hard R-rated caper about smuggling—drugs, guns, human beings—would seem outlandishly beyond the realm of reality if it weren’t based at least somewhat on a true story. Which we’re dutifully told at the outset that it is.

But how much truth is actually here? National Review’ s Kyle Smith suggests an answer: not much. “ American Made could have been called American Made-Up . It amounts to an enormously contrived effort by Doug Liman, the son of the Senate’s lead counsel in the Iran-Contra hearings, to reshape the tangle of that scandal into a larkish Tom Cruise adventure. Truth was not an impediment.” Smith even notes that Liman has described the story as a “fun lie.”

But given the amount of profanity, sex and often consequence-free recklessness we see on display here, it might be more accurate to drop the “fun” descriptor and just call it a lie.

Adam R. Holz

After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.

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• American Made took significant liberties with storytelling and altered names for dramatic impact in depicting the true story of Barry Seal's involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair in the 1980s.
• The film portrays certain characters and events that did not exist in Barry Seal's real life, such as his wife Lucy's name being changed to Deborah and the creation of Monty Schafer, a composite of various government officials.
• While American Made suggests a direct connection between Barry Seal and the CIA, there is no evidence to support this claim. Seal consistently denied working for the CIA, and the film's portrayal exaggerates this relationship.

The 2017 film American Made , starring Tom Cruise as Barry Seal , captivated audiences with its stranger-than-fiction drama action about a drug runner for the CIA in an operation known as the Iran-Contra Affair in the 1980s. The movie featured a chapter of America's dark history and involvement in the drug smuggling of cocaine onto US soil, depicting the true story with action, intrigue, and sometimes dark comedy. However, as in the case of many Hollywood movies, American Made took significant liberties for storytelling and entertainment.

Tom Cruise took on a drastically different role as Barry Seal, highlighting the worlds of aviation, adrenaline addiction, drug smuggling, and government espionage. However, the line between reality and fiction is blurred in this cinematic account. While American Made offered an attention-grabbing narrative, several elements and names were altered or entirely fictionalized for dramatic impact. The film's director, Doug Liman, described the movie as " a fun lie based on a true story ," (via TIME ), signaling that American Made wasn't intended as a documentary about the notorious informant.

RELATED: Every Tom Cruise Movie Ranked Worst To Best

10 American Made Changes Barry Seal's Wife's Name

Lucy's real name was deborah seal..

Tom Cruise’s character, Barry Seal, is married to a woman named Lucy, portrayed by Sarah Wright in American Made . However, Barry Seal's real-life wife was named Deborah Seal . Wright plays Seal's foul-mouthed and supportive wife, who throughout the film enjoyed all the extravaganza and rich lifestyle her husband's activities brought to their lives. However, Seal married three times and had five children: a son and a daughter from his first wife, Barbara Bottoms, and three children with his third wife, Deborah Ann DuBois.

9 Monty Schafer Wasn't A Real-Life CIA Agent

Monty is a composite of several different government officials..

Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson impressively plays Monty Schafer, a CIA handler who recruits Barry Seal in a bar. But Monty Schafer never existed in Seal's real life. Monty a composite character in American Made , created to streamline the story and embody various government connections that Seal may have had. Created to represent Barry Seal's questionable connection with the CIA, Monty Schafer serves as the patriot handler who would go to extreme lengths and morally blurry lines to serve his country.

8 The Real Barry Seal Denied Having Worked For The CIA

There's no evidence that seal worked for the cia..

Barry Seal consistently denied having worked directly for the CIA. While there are ongoing conspiracy theories about his involvement with intelligence agencies, Seal himself has never confirmed these claims. American Made , however, paints a much more explicit connection between Seal and the CIA. In Del Hahn's book about Barry Seal's life, Smuggler's End: The Life and Death of Barry Seal , there is no evidence to support any claims that Seal worked for the CIA . Hahn was, in fact, part of the task force that pursued Seal in the 1980s. He uses several case documents and first-person accounts to dispel this idea and other half-truths about Seal.

7 The Cartel Didn't Kill Barry Seal's Brother-In-Law With A Car Bomb

Barry never actually had a brother-in-law who was killed by a car bomb..

American Made shows a dramatized version of Lucy's brother JB, played by Caleb Landry Jones, who steals money from Barry and ends up attracting the attention of the local authorities. The cartel decides to deal with JB, even though Barry opposes it. JB then gets killed by a car bomb. However, the real Barry Seal never had a brother-in-law who was killed by a car bomb.

6 The Government Didn't First Take Notice of Barry Seal's Smuggling Cuban Cigars

It was seal's drug trafficking that drew unwanted attention to him..

The government's interest in Barry Seal was claimed to stem from his smuggling of Cuban cigars in American Made . However, this is a significant leap from reality. The real Barry Seal caught the government's attention through his involvement in drug trafficking , not cigar smuggling. His criminal operations were far more severe and complex, including the smuggling of substantial quantities of cocaine and marijuana, and these various criminal activities are what led to his assassination, as explained in American Made's ending .

5 Seal's Involvement With Pablo Escobar And The Ochoa Brothers Was Exaggerated

Seal never met escobar until after his arrest..

The real Barry Seal was not as acquainted with the cartel bosses as American Made suggests, according to Del Hahn's book. Seal didn't meet Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa brothers in person until 1984, after his arrest, while he was working as an informant for the DEA on an undercover operation. American Made portrayed Barry Seal as having a close-knit relationship with drug lord Pablo Escobar. However, in reality, Seal was just one of many pilots involved in drug trafficking for the Medellín cartel, making this portrayal an exaggerated account.

RELATED: What Happened To The Real Jorge Ochoa After American Made

4 Barry Seal Wasn't Recruited By The CIA In A Bar

There's no evidence that suggests the way seal was recruited is accurate..

This is yet another debated myth since no facts remain on whether Barry Seal was working with the CIA or not. However, American Made dramatized Seal’s recruitment into the CIA by showing him being approached in a bar. There is no factual basis for this scene, marking another departure from reality. Even so, Barry Seal was indeed allowed to fly out of the country and return with illegal drugs that the feds made sure never reached their targets. Undercover cameras installed on Seal's plane captured photos on the tarmac of a Nicaraguan airport. Images showed Pablo Escobar with Sandinista government officials and soldiers, who were loading cocaine onto Seal's plane.

3 The Plane Crash Incident Was Dramatized

The crash-landing scene never happened in real life..

In Tom Cruise's American Made , Barry Seal crash-lands a plane in a suburban neighborhood while escaping the DEA, who ordered him to land. Barry emerges from the plane covered in cocaine. Seal hands wads of cash to a kid on a bike , telling the boy, " You never saw me. " There's no evidence that anything similar to this memorable scene ever happened in real life. Tom Cruise has always been known for performing his own stunts in intense action sequences, and American Made was no exception, which explains this moment's inclusion in the film.

2 Seal Was Fired When TWA Learned About His Weapon Trafficking

Seal falsely citied medical leave to explain his absences..

Barry Seal did not quit his job at Trans World Airlines (TWA) out of boredom, choosing to live life on the edge as American Made reveals. In 1974, Seal was fired for falsely citing medical leave when he was actually trafficking weapons. He had been arrested in 1972 by the U.S. Customs Service for trying to fly 1,350 pounds of plastic explosives to anti-Castro Cubans via Mexico, according to Del Hahn's book Smuggler's End: The Life and Death of Barry Seal.

1 The Zero-Gravity Love Scene Never Happened

Director doug liman was inspired by his own real-life flight..

The famous American Made love scene with Barry Seal and his wife in zero gravity never happened. Director Doug Liman told Vulture that when preparing for American Made with Cruise, he got the inspiration to create the fictional scene. Liman said, "He put the airplane into a parabolic arc and pinned me against the ceiling, and right at that moment, I had this inspiration. ... Wouldn't it be fun if they were fooling around in a plane and the plane went into the same kind of parabolic arc, and they got pinned against the ceiling?" The steamy scene was easily one of the most memorable moments in American Mad e .

Where to Watch American Made

Sources: TIME , Vulture , Smuggler's End: The Life and Death of Barry Seal

• American Made (2017)

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‘Mission: Impossible 7’ Trailer: Tom Cruise Defies Death in Blockbuster Action Installment

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Nothing is  too  impossible for Ethan Hunt.

Tom Cruise reprises his iconic spy action hero role for “ Mission: Impossible : Dead Reckoning – Part I,” the first installment of the conclusion to the 1996 film franchise. Cruise has played undercover CIA agent Ethan for close to 30 years, with “Mission: Impossible 7” arriving in theaters July 14, 2023, soon followed by “Mission: Impossible 8” out June 28, 2024.

Director Christopher McQuarrie also returns for both upcoming films, which will exclusively have theatrical releases in part due to Cruise’s urging . Production for “Dead Reckoning Part I” was repeatedly halted by the COVID-19 pandemic but eventually wrapped in September of 2021.

A first look at “Mission: Impossible 7” during Paramount Pictures’ showcase at CinemaCon earlier this year captured Cruise holding onto a plane while flying over South Africa. Not to be forgotten, but Cruise famously does his own stunts.

The trailer includes Cruise’s Ethan being told that his “days of fighting for the greater good are over” and that he needs to pick a side when it comes to international espionage. Returning stars Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, and Vanessa Kirby reprise their respective roles, while new cast members include Hayley Atwell and Pom Klementieff.

“The ‘MI’ series really does represent the pinnacle of filmmaking excellence,” Paramount president Brian Robbins said earlier this year at CinemaCon. “And we have no doubt that this new picture will set the bar even higher.”

Robbins continued, “After five release dates and a whole bunch of rumors where this movie would end up, we are finally ready to bring this phenomenal movie to where it always belonged, and that is your theaters.”

The budget reportedly ballooned upwards of $290 million during production, with additional funds allocated to finish post-production on the action epic. Cruise previously told  Empire magazine that a sequence involving him riding a motorcycle off a cliff was the most dangerous stunt of his career.

“I had about six seconds once I departed the ramp to pull the chute and I don’t want to get tangled in the bike,” Cruise revealed. “If I do, that’s not going to end well.”

“Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part I” will premiere July 14, 2023.

Check out the trailer below.

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Mission: Impossible: Who Is Kittridge, And Why Is He So Important To The Series?

Contains major spoilers for "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One"

One of the original members of the so-called Impossible Mission Force (IMF) is back for this year's " Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One ."

CIA director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) is a former IMF director and adversary of Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) whose last appearance in the franchise was the first "Mission: Impossible" film in 1996. In "Dead Reckoning," his primary objective is to retrieve the cruciform key that unlocks a supercomputer located on the sunken Russian submarine Sevastopol on behalf of the American government, going so far as to purchase it from black market arms dealer Alana Mitsopolis (also known as the White Widow, played by Vanessa Kirby). Though he was ultimately unsuccessful thanks in large part to some classic shenanigans with the IMF's standard-issue face masks, he is currently slated to return for "Dead Reckoning Part Two."

Kittridge and Czerny's return to the "Mission: Impossible" franchise feels especially impactful, considering not only how major of a role he played in the first installment but how that connects to an era almost three decades removed from where the franchise is now. The largely standalone films have played lightly with the idea of creating something more closely resembling an overarching, semi-serialized plot in the form of the Syndicate. Kittridge's return may be signaling that "Dead Reckoning" is working to establish a firm continuity, and possibly even twist and/or retcon that will tie all seven films together once and for all. As such, now is the perfect time to familiarize ourselves with the role he played in 1996's "Mission: Impossible."

How Eugene Kittridge almost got Ethan Hunt killed

In the original "Mission: Impossible" film, Eugene Kittridge is actually working as a member of the IMF — in fact, for the majority of the story, it appears as though he's the director.

The plot revolves around the IMF's attempts to secure the Non-Official Covers (NOC) List from a mole within their own ranks that aims to sell it to Alana Mitsopolis' mother, Max (Vanessa Redgrave). In the wrong hands, the NOC List could (and most likely would) be used to assassinate every deep-cover agent and asset in the IMF's ranks.

Throughout the film, Kittridge is obviously keen to make sure the list is safe in his care, a fact that only becomes suspicious after Ethan Hunt learns that the director of the IMF plans to sell the NOC List to Max himself. Unfortunately for Ethan, he was excommunicated from the IMF and forced to go on the run after he was framed for the murder of his team during one of the film's earliest sequences.

However, it is eventually uncovered that Kittridge is not the director of the IMF, the title instead having secretly reverted to former director Jim Phelps (Jon Voight). It was actually he — not Kittridge — who framed Ethan and arranged the sale of the NOC List. Even so, Kittridge's ruthless and naturally dubious personality made him the perfect fall guy for Phelps' schemes. Given that those questionable traits are still on display in "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One," it's fair to assume that he'll continue to be a thorn in Ethan's side regardless of what side of the law he's on.

Ex-CIA Agent Rates All The 'Mission: Impossible' Movies

Former CIA intelligence officer Andrew Bustamante rates all the "Mission: Impossible" movies, starring Tom Cruise, for realism. 

Bustamante looks at field-operation scenes in "Mission: Impossible" (1996), with Ving Rhames and Jon Voight; and "Mission: Impossible 2" (2000), with Thandiwe Newton. He breaks down spy gadgets and disguises in "Mission: Impossible III" (2006), with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Simon Pegg; and "Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol" (2011), with Jeremy Renner and Léa Seydoux. He compares Cruise's physical skills to real-life CIA training in "Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation" (2015), with Rebecca Ferguson; "Mission: Impossible — Fallout" (2018), with Henry Cavill; and "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One" (2023). 

Bustamante was a CIA covert intelligence officer for seven years. He worked in the National Clandestine Service, now called the Directorate of Operations. He is the founder of EverydaySpy, an education and training platform that teaches espionage tactics for everyday life. He is also the host of "Everyday Espionage Podcast."

You can find more about Bustamante and EverydaySpy at: https://everydayspy.com

Bustamante's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everydayspy

Bustamante's Twitter: https://twitter.com/everydayspy

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“I really wanted to say his dialogue”: Taylor Sheridan Squeezed Nicole Kidman Into His CIA Show After Actress Was Originally Set to Work Only as a Producer

N icole Kidman is not one of the highest-paid actresses in the world for no reason. With her consistently incredible work in film and television, the actress has time and again proved that she can do anything and everything, no matter the genre. Whether it’s a thriller like Destroyer or a rom-com like Just Go with It, Nicole Kidman knows just how to do justice to her roles.

She has also worked as a producer on many projects including Taylor Sheridan’s spy thriller, Special Ops: Lioness. The television series stars Zoe Saldaña in the lead role as Joe, a CIA officer in charge of the Lioness program. Nicole Kidman also has a supporting, yet pivotal role in the series, which was custom-made by Taylor Sheridan himself just so he could get the actress to come in front of the cameras for the show.

How Nicole Kidman Got to Be A Part of Special Ops: Lioness

The series is loosely based on a U.S. military program and follows the life of the agents on a “dangerous undercover mission to stop the next 9/11,” as per the show’s premise. While Zoe Saldaña plays the role of Joe, Nicole Kidman is responsible for bringing Kaitlyn Meade to life, who is a high-ranking officer in the Lioness program and also Joe’s superior.

“I was going to call him on his last night alive and I didn’t”: Nicole Kidman Had One Regret After Stanley Kubrick’s Death

Initially, Kidman joined the team of Special Ops: Lioness only as an executive producer but was later added to the cast by creator Taylor Sheridan . In an exclusive interview with ET , Kidman opened up about her role in the series stating that she was a huge fan of Sheridan’s work including Sicario, Hell or High Water, and of course, Yellowstone . Therefore, when Sheridan asked her if she’d like to be a part of Special Ops: Lioness as a producer, she couldn’t possibly say no!

While Kidman was content with working with the director solely as a producer, he surprised her by asking her if she’d like to be a part of the show’s cast as well.

“We loved [Yellowstone]. Loved it, watched it, ate it up but [I] was a huge fan of Taylor’s film work in terms of Sicario, Hell or High Water and so it was really exciting when he said, ‘I really want to do this with you as a producer.’ And then he said, ‘I can write you something that will be a supporting role… but you’ll be pivotal.’”

Kidman added that Sheridan’s dialogues and the fact that Saldaña and Laysla De Oliveira (Cruz Manuelos) were a part of the cast made her say yes to Sheridan’s proposal. Another reason was that she had never done a role quite like this one before.

“I really wanted to say his dialogue and I really wanted to be a part of it because of Zoe and Laysla and I’ve never done anything that was about the CIA or espionage. There’s such a muscularity with this show so that was new territory for me and exciting… …I’m always looking for different ground to explore and be a part of and also to help propel — at this stage in my career and life — other women to the forefront. To throw my support behind because I really feel like when you have a bit of power you have to share it, transfer it, use it in a positive way.”

“I don’t really think it was”: Nicole Kidman Didn’t Blame Stanley Kubrick for Her Marriage to Tom Cruise Falling Apart Despite Numerous Claims

The show was met with mixed reviews upon its release and has an average score of 56% on Rotten Tomatoes. While many critics praised Saldaña for her performance, it looks like Kidman got the short end of the stick. In its review of the series, The Telegraph stated that Kidman was “the one thing that lets the show down” with her “frozen face” being a distraction. Yikes.

Nicole Kidman Could Never Be an Undercover Agent in Real Life

Talking about whether she could make a good undercover agent in real life, Kidman stated that since her current job as an actress requires a lot of emotions, she couldn’t keep them under control if she ever worked as a secret agent.

“I didn’t choose it as a career, I’ll put it that way. I’d be pretty cr-p at it. As an actor, we live on our emotions. That’s what we use. That’s what we need and a lot of times we have to keep them completely available and sometimes not in check, whereas when you’re in this situation working undercover in the CIA, you have to keep those emotions in check… …You have to be able to compartmentalize and you have to be able to just look forward and not think back and deliberate and emotionally respond so that was actually what intrigued me about playing this because it was moving into a psychological state that’s not my natural state.”

Well, it’s a good thing then that she is not thinking about changing occupations at the moment. But if she were, a secret agent would probably not be the best route to take. After all, who doesn’t know Kidman?

Season 1 of Special Ops: Lioness is available to stream on Paramount+.